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Sunday, March 20, 2011

In two generations we have gone from General Patton telling his troops to grease their tanks with the enemy's guts to an extensive purge of Navy command officers over a series of raunchy video skits. Slowly but surely we are turning the greatest armed forces into the world, into the most politically correct disarmed forces the world has ever seen.

The USS Enterprise crackdown, like the firing of General McChrystal and the push to repeal "Don't Ask, Don't Tell", completely ignore military realities for political objectives. A political military is also a useless military. Stalin's purges of the Russian Army's commanders left the Soviet Union completely unprepared for the Nazi attack. And the US military is being shaped along the same lines into a political military overseen by men whose chief credential is that they share the same politics as the politicians whom they serve.

A congressional report now says that the US military has too many white males at the top. Women are being kept out of the highest ranks because they lack combat experience. The report calls on the military leadership to "better reflect the racial, ethnic and gender mix of American society". Which is code for affirmative action. If we didn't have enough incompetents at the top, we can look forward to an affirmative action military in which the generals will be there because of the color of their skin or their gender, not because they're the best at what they do.

The mandate that every civic institution has to reflect the multicultural politics of the liberal elites reflects their determination to impose their vision on the country by hijacking its institutions. And every institution touched by their vision has become functionally useless, incapable of performing even their simplest tasks, but always needing more money. America's great cities have become sinkholes. The Postal Service is on the verge of extinction. And now it's the military's turn.

Such dramatic overhauls of the military usually take place because it is culturally out of step with the government. Would be tyrants, such as Turkey's Erdogan, go after the military because it represents a barrier to absolute power. Others because the military is a barrier to their agenda. Sharon destroyed the once great IDF, purging its commanders and replacing them with political generals in order to push through his ethnic cleansing of the Jewish communities in Gaza, leading to the disastrous performance in the Second Lebanon War. The Democrats may not have anything as ambitious in mind, but they are determined to bring it culturally into line with their agenda. And that will destroy the military as anything other than a politically correct corps that will occasionally show up for UN peacekeeping missions.

This did not begin yesterday. The left has hated the American military because it is a vehicle of national exceptionalism. A strong military gives the country a sense of independence and confidence that many European countries have lost. During the Vietnam War, the Anti-War movement targeted the military as an institution and the soldier as an individual, in order to destroy America's ability to take independent military action. Despite the abolition of Don't Ask, Don't Tell, the left has continued its vocal opposition to an ROTC presence on campus. When a wounded Iraq War veteran spoke at Columbia, he was booed and jeered. Their excuse is that the military "discriminates" against transsexuals. And when that barrier too is dismantled, then there will be something else. It's not about gays or transsexuals, it's about a deep rooted ideological hostility to the military. Not because of any specific policy, but because of what it represents as the defenders of a country and an order that the left would like to see destroyed.

The War on Terror began a new phase of leftist terror against the military, with political organizations, the media and lawyers joining forces to demonize and demoralize the armed forces. They had a limited success until Abu Ghraib opened the door to a variety of prosecutions. The message shifted from soldiers as heroes, to soldiers as villains. Washington D.C.'s message to the military became to be unobtrusive and avoid embarrassing us-- while still getting results. From the man in the field to the man in the big office, if you do something that catches the media's unblinking eye, we will hang you out to dry. The panic that set in after Abu Ghraib kept sending shivers through the establishment. Good men were dragged through the mud to show our good faith, our willingness to burn our own at the stake of public relations.

But the bug was always in the system. Because once the initial fighting was done, Afghanistan and Iraq became political objectives. Turning a mess of tribal warlords and urban religious factions into working democracies became the mission. A political mission laid out in Foggy Bottom by men who never have to go out and die for it. And the men who did, went on dying because it was an impossible political objective. The worse the situation became, the more their hands were tied. Forgotten by the media which once turned every death into a cause, American soldiers are dying in Afghanistan because of Rules of Engagement that are meant to win over the locals. The locals have not been won over, but the graves in military cemeteries keep on growing.

Thousands of Americans died on 9/11 because of a failure to identify the enemy. Thousands of Americans have died since then in Iraq and Afghanistan for the same reason. Because our governments invested their lives into the implementation of optimistic theories about human nature and democracy. A theory they had to cobble together from bits and pieces, because the reality was too ugly and uncompromisable for them to face. So they lied to us instead. And they lied to the men they sent off to die, so that wells might be dug and generators started, candy handed out to smiling children and elections held in crowded cities. Now the wells have been dug, and so have the graves, and the Taliban are still here, and the Mullahs spread their shadowy wings over the region.

Now two airmen are shot in Germany by a Kosovar Muslim, another child of our efforts to bring peace and democracy. And because German officials do not know enough to lie about what happened, the media winces and uncomfortably reports the truth, while Obama mumbles empty platitudes and PJ Crowley wonders aloud how you go about defining terrorism. That is another one of those political problems. Politicians and their camp followers are very much concerned with defining things, not according to their meanings, but their implications. Defining what happened in Frankfurt or Fort Hood as terrorism would require action. And not the politically appropriate kind.

Politics is about the manipulation of reality, but on the battlefield there is only reality itself. Political objectives break against such realities, and when there is enough intellectual and cultural distance between the politicians and the soldiers, then the soldiers go on dying. Islam is one of those realities. The Jihadi is not a figment of some right wing blogger's imagination, as so many of the intellectual influences on the present administration would like to believe. Nor is he a member of some tiny minority that disturbs the peace of an otherwise peaceable region. He represents the hole in the ideal world that sits on antique desks in Washington and Brussels. The blind spot of their politics, their idealism and their faith that the world is becoming a better place. Even as countless politicians and academics have decided on their golden future, a knife comes flying out of the dark places of the past. The unfinished business of history toppling the progressive towers in savagery and hate.

While the next wave of violence was being birthed in caverns and huts, the American military establishment was busy debating how to comply with the political objective of integrating gays into the military. No satirist could have come up with a more absurd scenario in wartime. But life always outdoes the satirist, if he waits around long enough. One day those solemn discussions may go down with Caligula's horse in the Senate as moments of blinding insanity by the leaders of a great power come completely untethered from reality. They are damning because they represent a terrible disassociation from the military as a means of defending the society, to the military as a representative of the ideals of society's political representatives.

To the politicians, the military must represent their ideals. And so the military has become the peace corps, the tolerance corps and eventually nothing but a series of defense contracts for Green energy and Global Warming defense. Give this bunch in charge another few years and the key national security objective will be defined as fighting Global Warming and the army will be recruiting environmentalists to promote sustainable living in Afghanistan. The left has never understood why we needed to fight terrorism at all, instead of its root causes, such as globalism, global warming and other things that begin with 'G'. It is lunacy, but so was the Bush Administration's deeply held belief that the only thing wrong with the Muslim world was a lack of voting booths.

The underlying problem is that neither administration was very clear on what the military was for. They were and are even less clear on what reality is. They used the military as a vehicle for their ideals and their global vision. The world in their minds is one great line of dominoes and they have a moral obligation to send them flying in the right direction. This childish world-image collides with reality, men die, and still the dominoes go on falling in the game rooms of their minds.

The Muslim world still understands war in the old sense, a contest in which forces war to impose their will on one another. Their war is one of attrition. They cannot beat us in a straight contest, but give them enough time and they can still make us retreat.

They want to impose Islam on us so that we too will cry Allah Akbar, acknowledging the supremacy of their culture and race over our own .We want to impose something on them, but we don't know quite what it is. It's usually some muddled form of democracy, rights, freedoms, unions, multiculturalism, a dim murky mirror image of ourselves. But if the British couldn't do it after generations of colonialism, what in the world makes us think that we can.

The Muslim world has hated us ever since it learned that we existed, sometimes with the calmly implacable hatred of the other, sometimes with the burning rage of frustrated honor, sometimes hidden behind unctuous smiles, and sometimes with full throated bellows of rage. In this contest we are the weaker party because we hate less. Often we do not hate at all. And like tourists wandering with money in our hands through the bazaars of Cairo, that makes us vulnerable. Our enemies pride themselves not on their strength of arms, their intelligence or competence-- but on the strength of their hate. It is a fevered hate that would break itself against our arms, our intelligence and our competence-- if we were to actually make use of them.

It is not that we lack the ability to defend ourselves. It is that we lack the understanding and the will. Our leaders aspire to a purity of ideals that transcends self-interest, and such Gandhian austerity is another form of death. To say that we would rather die than defend ourselves is to commit suicide. To place a society's ideals above its survival is folly, as the society's doom is also the doom of its ideals. And those who do this are no longer following ideals, but a peculiar and fanatical faith of their own that compels them to die rather than spill a drop of the enemy's blood. But there is a more commonplace form of folly, to define reality narrowly by those ideals and to send men out into the trenches to die for them. After doing it a few too many times, Europe decided that it would no longer send men off to die for any reason, and then was forced to do it anyway.

Now the civilized world has decided that it will not send men off to die except for wholly unselfish reasons, pure 'good of other men' reasons, sanctified by the blessing of the UN and the international community. Good and pure 'feed the starving children' type reasons. No more greedy warmongering or cynical landgrabbing. We are now a good and pure people who rarely kill, and if we kill, it is only because we have absolutely no other choice. Why we would rather die than kill, and often do.

But war is selfish, not altruistic. It is a selfish decision to take the life of another, rather than our own or that of our loved ones or our fellow men. Its nobility comes from that very selfishness, a selfishness rooted in kinship and friendship, rather than the abstract ideals which so often come down to nothing. If we are to fight, then we must be selfish. If we are to win, then we must be realistic. Politics has no place on the battlefield. The only thing worth fighting for is ourselves. Our land, our homes, our survival. It is one thing to fight side by side in alliance with friends, but fighting wars to reform enemies is the worst sort of foolishness. We can try to transform our enemies, but then they will transform us also as well. By trying to win over Islam to our way of life, we have given it great influence over us.

To avoid casualties, we have become cleverer weaponsmiths, devising ways to avoid facing that bullet. But that cleverness often seems like cowardice. To avoid suicide bombers, Israel built up walls and border defenses. And then the terrorists began to shoot rockets over the fences. So Israel built and deployed, 'Iron Dome' a counter-rocket system. And after all this effort, Israel is still under siege because the enemy is still there. An enemy that Israel could easily defeat, if its leaders had the political will. All the clever technologies create a space age ghetto, surrounded by enemies who were once enclosed, but with each retreat, are the ones doing the enclosing.

The rest of the free world is cleverly building its own ghettos, dividing so that the conquerors will have an easier time of it. Worrying over the morals and ethics of their actions. Purifying its armies to reflect its ideals of tolerance, co-existence and surrendering before the first shot has even been fired.

For now the First World has the best soldiers and the worst leaders. And it would have almost be better if it were the other way around. The generals who are the interface between the two have become politicians. The armies rot, go unused or misused, and the enemy passes right around them. We can't win if we don't fight, and we aren't fighting. Not for ourselves anyway. For the purity of our ideals, and for some notion that everyone is entitled to a voting booth, birth control and microfinance, but not for ourselves. And until we start fighting for ourselves, until we find leaders who want to defend a country, rather than a set of ideals, then we will go on spending the lives of our soldiers for nothing and the future of our civilization for a tin penny prize.

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comments:

If I had to pick the one thing that frightened me the most, it is the weakening of our military and Israel's military and the weakness of the leadership in the US and Israel in protecting its citizens.

Anyone ever notice how perfunctory Obama's salute is to the attending Marine when he debouches from the Presidential helicopter? It's obvious he hates saluting anything in uniform. Under Clinton and the current resident of the White House, we have seen a concerted campaign to literally emasculate the American military, from pushing women into combat roles to banning smoking on our submarines to punishing commanders for being men who notice girls. The liberal-left concept of our military is that it should be, not an efficacious fighting force, but rather an army of obedient and lobotomized multi-gender social workers who happen to wear uniforms, carry guns or sail on ships, going to the aid of earthquake and tsunami victims. To them, our military exists to relieve pain and suffering, not to inflict them on our committed enemies, whose agenda is conquest and victory at any cost.

As a secessionist, and Southron, we welcome the various moves to weaken the Union military. When it's full of socomites commanded by people with an average IQ of 85, they will cease to be a significant danger to us, and the rest of America.

Today Americans are far more likely to have their lives ruined, or worse be killed, by the US government than by anyone from another country.

Yes. In 1996, after touring much of the Arab world, I came back and told people we were at war, only we did not know it. And they would win, because they, and in particular their young men, were far more passionate about their cause than we are about ours.

It's all down to Cultural Marxism. The destruction of institutions, racial and sexual equality, tolerance, PC, feminism and the rest of the nonsense.

And it begs a question: If a people cannot summon the will to fight and defend their territory and way of life to preserve them for future generations, do they deserve to survive? Mother nature sets the rules and is unforgiving. The West is committing suicide, I honestly cannot see a change of course.

" For now the First World has the best soldiers and the worst leaders. "

How true and Libya is such a perfect example. The stated objective is to protect civilians but not remove the threat to those civilians. I'm having a hard time understanding that. But then again removing Gadhafi and risking another Islamic Theocracy isn't a good idea either, my point being though "remove the threat".

Now Obama has sucked us into a situation where the Arab League is rethinking their vote to ok a no-fly zone. Turn on the Islamist propaganda machine so our "friends" in the Middle East can stir their masses and declare more jihad on us American Imperialist's. What happened to a congressional resolution for or against our involvement in the first place, since when do we commit our Military and ask them to risk their lives at the whim of the UN and The Arab League. And what did these people think we were going to do drop "paint ball" bombs? G-d help the first American pilot that mistakenly kills innocent civilians on the ground, after the apology he'll be the "sacrifical lamb" at a court martial because 15 seconds was more than enough time to identify his target, drop his payload, and get his ass home safely before the triple A fire turned his aircraft into swiss cheese. Not to mention that he might be forced to bail out over enemy territory where his life expectancy would amount to less time than he had to drop his bombs. Of course it wasn't bad leadership that put him in that situation in the first place. And of course, you don't see any pilots from those same Arab League nations taking that risk, do you. Now that's a coallition.

That's American Leadership, Patton wouldn't be able to help us today Daniel; he'd be admitted to a hospitol while doctors attempted to figure out why he's chronically sick to his stomach.

Wow Daniel an amazing in depth and absolutely correct analysis of what is happening to our military. Thinking about each PC activity as isolated incidences doesn't put this in proper perspective.

Congress would do well to spend this time trying to determine why there are not enough white guys playing in the NBA or where the skinny linemen are in the NFL. Hey we need women in both those places as well. Where are the 400lb gay-Latino shortstops in Major League Base Ball? I guess all the white guys are too busy dancing..in WaaaahshingTON. Thanks for the great read, going to repost and link back. JC. www.achargingelephant.com

I forgot to mention the death-inviting ROEs or Rules of Engagement imposed on our troops, together with the mandatory political indoctrination they must undergo before they can draw a bead on any "extremists" out to kill them. (Names and identities withheld to protect the enemy.) A man like Patton wouldn't rise in today's military. He wouldn't be wanted. He'd be lucky to be assigned to kitchen police duties. He never viewed the military as an alternative Peace Corps, nor war as a ballroom dance.

Edward Cline your exactly right, Patton hard a hard time making it in the Army of the 1940's because of his views and his willingness to express them. I can't imagine how he would be received to todays climate. If the Germans didn't believe he was going to lead the invasion of Europe I think he would have sat out the war behind a desk in Washington.

I get angry every time I see the "A Global Force for Good" commercials for our Navy on tv. Their business is supposed to be KILLING people and making our potential enemies think twice about trying to KILL US...not being "rescuers" for the "victims" of the world, while being a social encounter, job corps, and welfare substitute for its members at the same time. Ever watch "Star Trek: Voyager?"

Daniel, I disagree with nothing you have stated here. But what I didn't see were answers to the harder questions. The devil’s in the details, after all. How would you wage this war against Islam? Palestine is just one target. What replaces Palestine, and what would Israel then face in retribution? Doesn't Palestine belong to Israel - will those treaties be enough to protect them? Is political will truly the issue or is it concern for the people within? What about Amr, who seems Saddams ideological twin and may soon rule Egypt?

What about the Taliban in A-stan or Pakistan - do we still take the fight to them? Isn't the other choice to wait here looking in all directions to defend our porous borders? Or do we ideally withdraw and close our borders, an island unto ourselves? What about those Muslims that remain? Or CAIR and all the other organizations?

I fully agree our future depends on pushing back against both the attack from without and within. But identifying the problem is only the first step. We all seem to agree on that. Identifying the solutions seems a bit more complicated, at least to me. I’d be interested in seeing your thoughts on these things because I’m a bit overwhelmed. But resignation is not an option.

It seems to me that political change will not happen unless the public are moved. Our public isn’t even aware, most of them, and the media is in no hurry to change that. So I do my small part to put information out there, have the conversation, make the argument. Wish I had your gift.

Generals have *always* been political creatures of one from or another. This is why, since the 19th century or so, it has been the Colonels who have led the various military juntas throughout the Third World. But the US has placed such severe limits on the amount of sustainable forces under a given Colonel's command that it would take a cabal of such men to effect any military action against (or without) the orders of their Generals.

Occasionally I actually discuss possible solutions for the U.S. that don't involve our suicide, and that do include the forceable exclusion of Muslims from our borders. That always gets a dismissive "that can never happen here", "try something less fantastical", do try to be realistic", and so forth. My answer is that it may be amazing to see what is possible, realistic, and can be done when we are having monthly bombings, murder in every town, vigilanteism as the only form of public defense, and swirling civil war. It is impossible for me to be sure we as a society will get into fighting and full defense mode, but otherwise we are goners.

It is realistic. Already we have Muslim communities that do not allow anyone but Muslims in their activities. They pray in the streets and demand the murder of americans. They do this right in broad daylight in front of thousands.

The "videos" weren't even "raunchy" - they'd have been 99% fine in prime-time broadcast TV.

The REAL problem was (1) that they used the word "fag" from time to time and (2) that they were filmed by a competent officer in the old-school mold who was downstream of a couple more.

This was not punishment - it was nothing more than an excuse for a purge. Its "victims" should but count themselves blessed that we haven't quite descended all the way to the bottom yet, otherwise they'd have been met with a bullet instead of a pink-slip.

Personally, I'm getting to the point that I almost cheer the ever-growing idiocracy -- each moronic decision brings us closer to the final collapse, and thus to the chance to do it right the next time.

No, I don't WANT the coming collapse - no sane person could - but I believe it's inevitable and thus we might as well just get it over with.